Abd ul-Rahman Lomax created the blog coldfusioncommunity.net and spent the bulk of 2017 using it to document the Andrea Rossi-Industrial Heat lawsuits.

In episode 09 of the Cold Fusion Now! podcast, he talks with Ruby about the dream partnership that ended with suspicion and the drama of a Miami, Florida trial court.

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax sat in Richard Feynman’s lectures at Cal Tech in 1961 through 1963. In 2009, he began challenging Wikipedia about their bias regarding cold fusion. Since then, he’s been involved in the cold fusion/LENR field. He was published in the 2015 special LENR issue of Current Science journal on the correlation of excess heat and the production of helium with the paper Replicable cold fusion experiment: heat/helium ratio [.pdf].

I think Jed said the same thing about SKINR, and Ahlfors uncovered some evidence Seashore Research Company (Duncan's Texas Tech LENR lab) is active. The Purdue University connection may be Prof Kim? IH paid him some good money.

Those Rossi believers who do not like to read, or hear any facts about the Rossi/IH suit, Doral and the day in court they settled, should just skip to minute :33. The remaining 6 minutes are as Zeus already described. And yes, that "Purdue theoretician" would be Kim. Hopefully he (Abd) does go to Texas Tech/Seashore Research as he hopes, and brings back a progress report from Dr. Duncan.

Ruby's series of interviews have covered the state of LENR science/research from several insiders perspectives, the field as seen by a Patent Attorney, and now Abd adds his observations about Rossi/IH. He does a good job keeping it objective (admits to liking the man), short (for him ) and factual. Something that needed to be said IMO.

Abd has pointed out he said in the podcast that Hagelstein is working with IH, not Swartz. He also reckons he hasn’t linked Swartz to IH previously - in which case, I misinterpreted this:

Abd wrote:

Few would buy it [Swartz’s NANOR], if any, but IH might — and, in fact, I would not be surprised to find out that they have already arranged independent testing. They are working with Hagelstein and the connection between Hagelstein and Swartz is close enough that Hagelstein would not talk with me, because Swartz. He did not explain, but it was obvious.

And predictably, Abd Ul-Prolixity wasted two paragraphs arguing that my use of the term “currently withholding good news” is vastly and outrageously different to his preferred euphemism: "not yet talking about good news”... Still sounds like the same thing to me though.

And no Abd, that wasn’t me writing on 'your' rationalwiki talkpage. It’s probably someone trying to goad you into an argument so they can ban your latest sock account. I have zero interest in wiki-fiddling.

Although last time I claimed someone was impersonating me (on CFC.net, no less), I was attacked and repeatedly called a liar by His Lordship, so I guess we’ll see what happens this time...

I also take umbrage with the following:

Lomax wrote:

Rossi v. Darden, far from being useless noise, revealed a great deal that was, previously, secret and obscure. Those who only want to make brief smart-ass comments, though, and who don’t put in what it takes to review the record, will indeed end up with nothing useful.

Which seems to imply that I have taken 'nothing useful' from the Rossi v Darden case. Which is actually probably true, as the only thing that was really 'revealed' was that Rossi is FOS, and that didn't take a genius to deduct, even before the pre-trial hearings started (Perhaps Abd would like to list his Top Three Previously Obscure Facts, if he disagrees with that statement).

At best, all the trial revealed was ‘a great deal of previously secret and obscure useless noise'. Quite why it deserved 30+ mins of jaw flapping, compared to <10mins for the rest of IH's investments, Texas/SKINR, and the heat vs. helium topic is beyond me.

PS. It turns out the allegedly scurrilous rumour about the shovelling of the well-worn Feynman anecdote into the podcast was 100% true! ...Who would have thought!

Yes, Hagelstein and Swartz have been joined at the hip since birth. Talk to one, and the other may answer. Understandable mix-up.

I do agree with Abd in that he has not linked Swartz to IH before. No one has for that matter. But it is in the Rossi/IH court documents somewhere, that IH flew Hagelstein to North Carolina for consultations about H loading, so no mystery to that connection.

In early 2018, Lomax was globally banned by the Wikimedia Foundation for doxing users (he was hosting Wikipedia users addresses and post-codes on his blog and he still does this). He also doxed and harassed a prominent astronomer who is a Wikipedia editor.

You can see the ban template on Abd's account. Less than 30 people in the world have ever been banned by the Wikipedia Foundation (there have been millions and millions of users).

To this day Lomax claims he was "innocent" and "framed" by a group of cold fusion skeptics who were out to get him, which is a lie.

I have seen Lomax pick fights with people and insult people on the internet for years but on no occasion does he ever actually man up and admit to his mistakes, he always has to blame others for his online abusive or erratic behaviour.

My understanding is that Lomax is not a scientist. He has no science education or degree. On his blog he pokes fun at people for having a lack of science education but he has no degree in anything himself.

A common scare tactic Lomax uses online to threaten people is that he is going to "sue people" or open a lawsuit against people who have merely criticized him in some way, but it is always "I am going to", "I am planning to". He says he is going to sue the Wikimedia Foundation for banning him but I doubt this will ever happen. You can't sue someone for banning on a public wiki. It is laughable that he thinks otherwise.

Does anyone else know anything about this eccentric Lomax character? Apart from getting banned all over the web, what else is he involved with? He claims to be a cold fusion expert but his knowledge about the subject seems to be lacking from the podcast interview.

To improve collective understanding of cold fusion, we must recognize and understand the history. Cold fusion was called, by John R. Huizenga,, “ Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century. ” He was correct. Gary Taubes titled his book, prominently, Bad Science, and then in much smaller text, The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion. Taubes was a writer facing no income until he finished the book. The 1989 DoE panel was charged with finding a quick answer in a field where quick answers did not exist. What the Panel reported was not wrong, in that the evidence at that point was not conclusive. They correctly suggested further research. Taubes, in his rush to complete, did not consider Miles' heat/helium work. Just as premature rejection led to a widespread belief that cold fusion was found to be a mistake “long ago,” so too, reaction to that belief damaged our own work. We believed that it was necessary to produce 'better' results to convince skeptics, “better” usually meaning substantial and reliable heat. Yet the most significant missing evidence from the original work was not heat, it was the reaction product,

and especially a correlated nuclear product. Until this shifts, it is a confirmed characteristic of cold fusion that heat is erratic, not reliable. Steady,reliable results may be a sign of possible artifact ... or possible fraud. That may change some day, but the tragedy is that the intense search for “better” results damaged the scientific study of the known effect. Miles showed the way in 1991 with heat/helium.. This considered astonishing by Huizenga “if confirmed,” did not depend at all on reliability. It used the variability in heat as “self-control.” There were shortcomings in the Miles work, some of them addressed later, and all addressable by replication with more data from more samples, with increased precision and clearly-defined protocols. Basic confirmation of Miles took many years, and the best result so far, an individual test instead of a substantial series, still had an estimated precision of ten percent. In the rush to confirm cold fusion, to vindicate Pons and Fleischmann, we lost the scientific method, in which one seeks to prove one's own ideas wrong, diligently. Pons and Fleischmann had an idea that the effect they discovered was a bulk effect. If the reaction were taking place in the bulk, and if helium were the product, it would remain in the bulk, yet when the bulk was studied, helium was not found there. So they failed to release the promised helium analysis results from Johnson-Matthey, and deprecated helium measurement as too expensive, hence their heat-after-death work in France did not apparently include helium measurements. The net result was the waste of millions of dollars, and years of delay. We need the mainstream. Running with one leg tied until we have communicated the realities of cold fusion to the scientific world, we need the interest of genuine skeptics, those who will actually investigate and sanely criticize what is claimed. That interplay is necessary for science. We will explore the history (including recent), draw practical conclusions, and discover possibilities

I pity the scientist who had to respond to Brooks. It must be difficult to remain polite. I suppose he is tempted to burst out saying: "Of course not, you idiot! In 100 years nothing like that could happen!"